OKX · Strategy Hands-On
OKX Trading Bot Marketplace: What Gets Copied With a Bot
When you copy a grid bot in OKX's Trading Bot Marketplace, the range, the grid count and most advanced settings come over from the other person unchanged. The investment amount is yours to enter, and on a futures grid so are the leverage and reserved margin. If they stop their bot, yours stops too. Whether yours changes when they later edit theirs depends on whether a sync status shows at the top of your bot's details page.
Where the Bot Marketplace is and what is in it
OKX's help article How to perform recurring buy? gives the app path: Trade > Trading bots, enter the Bot Marketplace, then pick a bot type under All. The overview article What are OKX's crypto trading bots and how do I utilize it? gives the web path: hover over Trade and select Trading bots.
That overview lists eleven bots: Spot grid, Futures grid, Futures DCA (Martingale), Smart arbitrage, Spot DCA (Martingale), Recurring buy, Signal bot, Iceberg orders, TWAP orders, Smart portfolio and Arbitrage.
The marketplace's own page, the Trading Bot Marketplace FAQ, describes it as serving two groups at once: creators who publish their bots and copiers who use them, with creators able to earn up to 30% of copiers' profits. So when you copy a bot under profit sharing, part of what it earns goes to its author.
How this differs from copy trading, in a sentence: copy trading replicates each trade a person places by hand, while the marketplace replicates a set of bot settings and then lets the bot run on them. The copy trading modes, profit-share settlement and stopping rules are in OKX copy trading rules.
How the risk level on a Smart Picks card is set
What's the risk and runtime for Smart Picks? covers the set OKX picks itself. On BTC, ETH and SOL it offers three styles, Swing Grid Bots, HODL Grid Bots and Grid Sniper Bots, which you can start in one click or customize. Each card shows a risk level and a typical runtime.
The risk level is based on Delta, which measures how much of the investment is exposed to changes in the asset's market price:
| Level | Delta | Examples on the page |
|---|---|---|
| Conservative (lower risk) | < 0.05 | Arbitrage, Swing grid bots |
| Balanced (moderate risk) | = 1 | HODL grid bots, Spot Copy Trading, Yield Hunter |
| Aggressive (higher risk) | > 1 | Futures Copy Trading |
A Delta of 1 means the strategy is fully invested in spot positions and directly affected by price changes. Below 1 means less exposure. Above 1 means more, often through leverage. So what "moderate risk" means in practice is that this money falls about as far as the coin does.
Copying a grid bot: what is inherited, what you set
Copying a grid someone has published is what OKX calls copying a lead trader's bot under the profit-sharing model. The rules sit in the spot grid FAQ and the futures grid FAQ.
Spot grid
From the Spot grid bot FAQ:
- Inherited: basic settings such as the grid range and number of grids, and advanced settings such as Trailing Up/Down and entry/exit conditions.
- Not carried over: Simple Earn allocation. It is not activated on the copied bot even if the lead bot has it on.
- Possibly hidden: some core settings may not be visible to the copier.
Futures grid
From the Futures grid bot FAQ:
- Copied: price range, grid count and direction, plus advanced settings such as start/stop conditions and take-profit/stop-loss. Some advanced or proprietary settings may be hidden.
- Yours to set: investment amount, reserved margin and leverage.
- Not available: profit withdrawal. The FAQ says it is not supported for copy trading strategies.
Read together: the range and grid count come from the other person, and you may not even see all the core settings. How much to invest is your decision, and on futures so is the leverage. The author drew the range around the price at the time they started. Where the market sits inside that range at the moment you copy decides how many grids are bought the instant your bot opens. The arithmetic for that is in the worked calculation in OKX grid bot settings.
If the lead bot is edited or stopped, what happens to yours?
Edits first. On this point two OKX pages say opposite things:
- The Spot grid bot FAQ says there is no sync: edits, added investments and withdrawn profits made by the lead bot during operation are not copied.
- The last three questions of the Copy trading FAQ say there is: when the lead trader changes their contract grid or spot grid strategy parameters, your copied strategy updates automatically. Sync pauses in two cases, when "Your account balance is insufficient to cover the funds required for the new parameters" and when "The profit rate of a single grid in the adjusted strategy would be negative". Either way you are told by in-app message, push notification or email, and the sync status appears at the top of the bot's details page.
After copying, look at the top of the bot's details page for a sync status. If there is one, plan as though sync is on and keep some spare balance in the trading account, because a change to the range on their side can raise the funds needed on yours.
Stopping is clearer. The Spot grid bot FAQ says that if the lead bot stops, the copied bot also stops and its assets are sold at market price, and it gives this as one reason a bot can stop on its own. The Futures grid bot FAQ lists the copy trading source being stopped among the causes of an unexpected stop. How the stop is done differs too: when you stop a spot grid you created yourself you can either sell the assets at market price or return them to your trading account, whereas a lead trader stopping a lead bot can only sell at market.
So when a copied bot ends, and whether it sells near a low when it does, is not entirely up to you. That is the main difference from opening your own grid with the same numbers.
The return next to platform-suggested parameters is a backtest estimate
The risk warning in OKX's bots overview says: "The returns displayed on the trading page are estimated based on historical backtesting data" and do not guarantee actual returns. Read that way, the return shown next to platform-suggested parameters is a backtested estimate, not money anyone made.
For bots published by other users, no Help Center page defines field by field how the numbers on a card are calculated. What is defined is what you see on the details page once a bot is running: how a spot grid's Total PnL, Grid profits and Unpaired PnL are each worked out is covered in OKX spot grid Total PnL, Grid profits and Unpaired PnL. Before copying, at least find out which of those three the return on the card corresponds to. If you cannot tell, do not use it to rank one bot against another.
Three specific situations
Where is the Trading Bot Marketplace on OKX?
In the app, go to Trade > Trading bots and open the Bot Marketplace, where All lists the bot types. On the web, hover over Trade and select Trading bots. The app path comes from OKX's help article How to perform recurring buy?, and the web path from its bots overview article.
After I copy someone's grid bot, do my settings change when they edit theirs?
Check the top of your bot's details page: if a sync status is shown, plan as though edits are synced and keep spare balance in the trading account. OKX's pages give two answers. The Spot grid bot FAQ says edits, added investments and withdrawn profits made by the lead bot while it runs are not copied. The Copy trading FAQ says that when the lead trader changes their futures grid or spot grid parameters, your copied bot updates automatically, and that sync pauses if your balance cannot cover the new parameters or the profit rate of a single grid would turn negative.
What happens to my copied bot if the lead trader stops theirs?
According to the Spot grid bot FAQ, the copied bot also stops and its assets are sold at market price. The Futures grid bot FAQ likewise lists the copy trading source being stopped among the reasons a futures grid bot stops unexpectedly. When a copied bot ends is not entirely up to you.